I’m sitting here at Tino’s restaurant wondering how much longer my food is going to take. I’ve been here for at least 20 minutes already and no one has taken my order. A waitress has passed by me twice without giving me my meal. In fact, she’s avoiding eye contact because she knows it’s her job and she just doesn’t want to do it.

I had to start coming here because my old restaurant, Great Papa’s, has become too expensive. I can no longer afford my prior chef. He kept raising his rates citing nonsense like overhead and food poisoning insurance. I’m pretty sure that he just wants more money so he can join a country club. We all know how greedy chefs are.

Christ, how long is this going to take? Is he out playing golf somewhere? Just where is my chef? My waitress mentioned something about a kitchen fire. My last chef tried to use the emergency excuse whenever he wanted free time to surf the Internet, too.

Doesn’t he know that food is a basic right? I can’t go on if these meals become too expensive. Why does he keep raising the rates? There needs to be some kind of intervention. A system where food can be given to the good citizens of this nation so that we can eat and know that our bellies will not starve. On top of that, I need everything on the menu, right now, and for free. And I don’t care how many times they tell me that the food won’t mix well together. Don’t let laziness be an excuse.

I don’t trust the chefs and chef assistants anyway. They’re always making mistakes. There needs to be more oversight of their assistants, the food prepares. Lord knows I don’t want them messing up my food. Just last week my friend Joanna got food poisoning from eating the shrimp. She stayed up the whole night vomiting. That crazy ER doctor that she went to see tried to pawn it off on my friend by saying she was throwing up because she had been drinking too much whiskey. I’m pretty sure that the doctor was in cahoots with the chef.

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Hee hee, very funny! And of course the doctor was in cahoots with the chef! They’re out playing golf together in the same country club, laughing about their diabolical plan! The chef poisons people so that they have to see the doctor, so he gets more money, and the doc, in turn, reccomends the chef’s restaurant to his patients so that the chef can get more money! I wonder why no one has realized this before!

As usual, very funny and well written post! I loved the first person perspective on the whole thing. Awesome job!

anonymoussaid,

There needs to be some kind of intervention, you say. Uh, well, there already is.

The U.S. has historically subsidized food production in the form of price supports for farmers, low-cost commodity distribution programs and so on, to ensure that basic food costs remain affordable to everyone. What a concept! And if you’re really down and out, there’s always the food shelf or the soup kitchen, because most communities see it as a public service to help hungry people receive the basics.

Great Papa’s and Tino’s are the equivalent of cosmetic surgery – a nice little luxury but not really necessary.

If you really wanted to compare medicine and food production, you should be looking at the farmers. They’re the ones who do the real work. Ever shoveled manure on a dairy farm or a hog farm? Ever spent thousands of dollars on soybean seed, only to have your crop destroyed by a hailstorm in July, when it’s too late in the season to replant?

Fishing and agriculture are the two most dangerous and difficult occupations in the U.S. Yet here you are, complaining about the service at Tino’s.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point that your analogy is just really, really dumb. I thought you were smarter than this.

Studentsaid,

I think that medical practice has some things in common with food service. Both have to place patron health above all else and both have high overhead. A kitchen can spend $10K, even more, per month in energy costs just for the gas ovens. Add staff, electric, insurance, rent, etc and the costs can be much higher than a doctors. A doctor’s profit marging typically runs inthe 50 40 to 50% range while for most restaurants, the profit margin is ~2-5%. High end restaurants can do very well, but so can high end doctors.
The name of the game for both doctors and restaurants is new and repeat customer business and keeping costs low without sacrificing service or quality.
All in all, the food service industry is much more challenging than the medical practice business, as evidence by a higher fail rate year after year.
Regarding your analogy to expecting free food or the entire menu for one low price, it kind of works for me. The only problem without is that you lump no insurance patients with insurance patients. For people with great insurance, your analagy works. For those with no coverage, the analogy fall flat as they pay maximally for everything, ie they pay $100 per glass of soda. For those of us in the middle, we get stuck with unexpected bills. In your example, a 30% gratuity fee that was not published in the literature before you chose the restaurant.
Anyway, good post. Provocative.